Shifting the Focus of Food Fraud: Confronting a Human Rights Challenge to Deliver Food Security

While food fraud is a national issue that must be dealt with by the relevant national authorities, due to the globalised nature of food chains, there may also be an important guiding crime prevention role for the international community that currently lacks. Food fraud undermines food security, and by extension denies human rights, issues that are squarely within the remit of the international legal domain. Food fraud is an organised crime conducted by sophisticated criminal networks who infiltrate global food supply chains by crossing international borders. Often, food fraud is intertwined with and enabled by other organised crimes, such as money laundering, corruption, and document fraud. While there remains an important role for the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), among others, in ensuring food is safe for human consumption, presently, there is an absence of international criminal responses. A shift in perspective is needed to enable food fraud to be dealt with alongside other transnational organised crimes under relevant international law. The United Nations Convention on Transnational Organized Crime (CTOC) encompasses activities that relate to, or enable food fraud, albeit no international law specifically mentions food fraud. This article argues that CTOC may be a suitable international legal framework through which appropriate criminal responses to food fraud may be underpinned.